California Coast & Ocean

By the time I arrived for our 7:30 a.m. appointment at his waterfront office at Crissy Field, in the San Francisco Presidio, Zeke Grader had been at work for more than two hours already. Early morning is the time he can get things done here without interruption.

The office is cozy, with a huge desk and comfortable leather chairs, the walls lined with books and photographs. It could easily be the study of a tenured university professor. And Grader is a scholar all right, with a law degree from the University of San Francisco, but he was drawn to a life of action. Having grown up around the boats and the docks in Fort Bragg, helping his parents, who shipped locally caught salmon to New York and Los Angeles to be made into lox, he had an eye for the fishing industry and a liking for the grumpy men and women who live from the ocean. He started at the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations at its founding in 1976 and has been its executive director ever since, navigating through times of major hardship and change with skill, good humor, and unflagging devotion to the 3,000 fishermen and women who work on small and medium-sized boats out of harbors in California, and some in Oregon and Washington as well.

Coast & Ocean: I’ve been wanting to talk with you for a long time, but now seems the right moment because of what happened with the crab fishermen after the Cosco Busan oil spill. Here we have a disaster just before the season opens, California fishermen agree to postpone the opening until it’s clear the crabs they catch won’t be contaminated, and then in come some big boats from Oregon, drop their traps outside the Farallones and land their catch in the dark of night. It seemed so wrong. Can you put it into context for us?

Zeke Grader: Well, I think the biggest problem we’ve had in the crab fishery over the last decade or so is that there is an adequate resource to provide for our fleet but, unfortunately, with the cutbacks in the trawler fleet--particularly after overfishing in the groundfish fishery by some of the large trawlers--a lot of them have jumped into the crab fishery and are really trying to do the same thing to crab which they did in the trawl fishery.

We succeeded in limiting the number of vessels in the fishery over a decade ago. [The California fleet numbers about 600 permitted boats.] Now we have been tackling the issue of the number of traps used per vessel. Keep in mind, trap limits are nothing new, we have them in our lobster fishery in California and they’re used in both the Maine and Florida lobster fisheries; Alaska has them and, as of a couple of years ago, Oregon and Washington have them for their crab fisheries. This is prudent in a number of ways: It provides for safer conditions for fishermen. Now, with so many traps out there, people feel compelled to try and fish every day, no matter what the weather, and they take risks. And then, so much crab hits the market at once [that the price is depressed]. If we reduce the number of traps, crab would flow into the market at a steadier pace.

So we are going to attempt to pursue trap limits again this year and we’re hoping we’ll be met with a different reaction from the governor, who has twice vetoed this legislation--and that’s totally inconsistent with his big push for protecting our oceans. We think he vetoed it because of influence from one large Oregon processor, Pacific Seafood. We’re hoping that’s going to change now.

People with small and large boats now agree on trap limits?

Concessions have been made. Right now people are looking at what Oregon and Washington have done, 300 traps for small boats, 500 for those who have had very large production. A larger boat will still have an advantage because they can work in much tougher weather. And really, when they get over 400 traps it’s not about how many they work per day, it’s about staking real estate. It’s just somebody trying to claim more of the crab grounds for themselves, as opposed to more equitable sharing.

Did the governor explain his veto?

The explanations were pretty lame. The cost, that it should be done through the Fish and Game Commission. But we don’t expect the Commission to take on the regulation of crab for at least ten years, they’ve got a big backlog of fisheries that they’re trying to develop fisheries management plans for that are more pressing biologically--and I don’t disagree. But we really need to deal with this particular problem right now before people are getting killed and we completely destroy our markets by trying to jam all this crab into them at once.

The fishermen want the limits?

Most supported the limits, even many of the larger vessel owners. The problem now is that there are large trawlers from the north who are trying to fish as much crab as they can around the trawl season, really not caring much about the markets. And that’s too bad because this is such a good product, it shouldn’t be treated as just a common commodity. It’s something very special and we need to be sensitive to when the prime market demand is, which is usually around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and try to provide for that.

There are two different markets. One is the fine white tablecloth market, the other is what I call the blue-collar thing, the crab feeds people put on as fundraisers for their volunteer fire departments, churches, scout troops, school libraries. Those are fun, people enjoy them. Both of those markets are pretty important, we want to maintain both. The problem is [with most of the crab being caught early in the season], much of the crab now goes to the freezer. Much of it goes to the casinos, for their buffets, particularly on the Mississippi River. That’s where this one large Oregon company that made the big campaign contribution to the governor has been selling, and that’s a waste of crab because after it sits in the freezer for a bit it has the texture and taste of Styrofoam. Of course people who have been smoking and drinking all night and hitting the casino buffet, they probably wouldn’t know the difference, so maybe we should just go with flavored Styrofoam or something for those markets and save the good crab for the white tablecloth markets and crab feeds.

So the large trawlers from Oregon were the ones that came in during the oil spill crisis here?

They [these trawlers] were the ones who were fishing when everyone else remained closed.

What happened after the Oregon boats unloaded their crab?

Some of it did reach the markets, but the word we had was that they had a real problem selling it because there was such concern about the safety of untested crab. Our argument was that we shouldn’t be putting this crab on the market because we were uncertain about the exact extent of the contaminated areas until we’d done some testing. And that’s what happened. After the testing was done and things looked to be clear, then everybody agreed to go fishing.

They were fishing outside the Farallones?

They were fishing inside the Farallones. Nobody was monitoring them that closely. The state closure only extended for three miles and we couldn’t understand that. With the Coast Guard overflights we know the oil was out as far as eight miles. Why the Coast Guard did not share this information with Fish and Game, or whether Fish and Game chose to ignore it, we are not certain.

If someone had eaten a contaminated crab and gotten sick . . . ?

It would have basically destroyed our markets. And that’s what we were worried about. We tried hard to make sure that crabs were safe and something people enjoyed. We work every year with the Department of Health Services on testing for domoic acid, which is a naturally occurring toxin, to make sure the crab were free of that, and we’ve had closures, and we asked for the closures [for the spill]. At the beginning of one season, over a decade ago, when crab tested positive for domoic acid, the Department of Health Services said they could do an advisory. [Domoic acid affects only the entrails, not the meat, but sometimes the entrails (or “butter”) are eaten.] We said no, we don’t want to risk it. Keep it closed, the crab will be there when they’ve purged this toxin out of their system, the season will just begin a little later.

There has been discussion of IFQs [individual fishing quotas] as a way to manage the crab fishery, and it’s said that has been successful in Alaska with halibut.

The only group that’s been pursuing IFQs that I know is Environmental Defense. And their push has always been to drive everything by market demand. For certain fisheries IFQs can work. For halibut and sablefish in Alaska they work, to an extent--but they require a great deal of regulation. For the crab, because of the nature of the critter, we don’t know each year how much is out there, so it makes it almost impossible to set a quota for it.

The way we’ve been able to manage the crab fishery is to go by what’s known as size, sex, and season, which to date seems to have worked. We are only taking male crabs over a certain size--they’ve been through one spawning cycle, so there’s always a spawning population of male crabs. We do not take female crabs--we only take [the males], or try to anyway, during the time of year when they’re hard-shelled. So if they’re handled carefully and you get one that’s female or undersized, it can be thrown back and survive. That seems to work.

Now we’re increasingly concerned about the sheer number of traps out there, whether that much handling may begin to affect the biology of the crab. There’s also a concern about the recreational fishery: They’re allowed to take undersized crab and female crabs. If that fishery continues to grow and take more and more, there could be a biological problem.

So IFQs for certain fisheries where we have some idea what the biomass is and we can apportion it, that can work--but even there we have to be careful because there’s been a big push on for processors to get quotas of the take. What we’ve ended up with, in so many instances with IFQs, is basically sharecropper fisheries, where nonfishing quota owners lease them out. To prevent that from happening in the Alaska halibut and sablefish fisheries, only the boat owner or crew who actually fish may own or use the fishing quota.

So the common resource is privatized for the benefit of the few, as has happened with federal water?

It’s somewhat like the situation we find ourselves in with some of the big water districts, which have contracts to buy water from the federal government very cheap and now they’re turning around and selling it at a big profit. The water is not going on the land, it’s basically being transferred to urban districts. And groups like Environmental Defense will argue water marketing makes for more efficiency. Well, I don’t think it’s made for more efficiency, I think it’s made for some very wealthy people.

I think a better method for managing our fisheries is through community development, to assure local people [coastal fishing communities] retain an interest and benefits from the fisheries. We’re now looking at how we might develop community-based management for the groundfish fishery, because it’s in the rebuilding stage. It will take a lot of thought, even on how we define community. We need to begin looking at how we can switch over to more community-based fisheries on a sustainable basis . . . probably at lower catch levels than we have now, but where we can develop more value from the fish. We’ve already seen this with squid. With some of what we call the wetfish or forage fish--anchovies, sardines, squid, herring--we need to move from what I’d call industrial-level fishing to a smaller, more artisanal mode. Rather than having those fish ground up for meal, ideally they should be targeted for fresh-fish markets. That will probably require working with chefs and others to create a consumer acceptance.

If kids had sardines or anchovies in their school lunch program they’d be a lot healthier, and probably better-behaved, because these are oily fish with omega-3s which do help with childhood behavior. Moving in those types of directions will be difficult, because right now there’s a big demand for sardines for feeding tuna net-pen “ranches” off Mexico. Absolutely the wrong way to be doing fisheries. Here we are taking fish--sardines, anchovy-- that were food for coastal communities for thousands of years in places like Peru. Now these fish are being taken not for human consumption, but to grind up for fish meal, for either salmon farms or tuna ranches, basically to go into the first-world middle-class or wealthy restaurants--and very inefficiently.

What are tuna net pens?

It started in the last few years, right off Ensenada, and also in Australia, I believe, and a few other places in the world. They’re not rearing the tuna, they’re capturing them and keeping them in feeding pens--they’re called fattening pens; they’re like feed lots. It takes a lot of energy, so your conversion ratio is 20 to 1, for 20 pounds of feed you may get one pound of tuna going to prime sushi bars.

Is this part of the ocean farming that’s now being promoted?

It’s one form. Salmon are more efficient in the conversion of feed than tuna, but their ratio is still three to five to one, and there are all kinds of problems associated with both types of operations. Aquaculture utilizing carnivorous stock hits wild forage fish harder to provide the feed for those operations. I think the best use of the smaller wild fish, particularly the oily fish, is to begin developing them for fresh markets, not to feed aquaculture operations.

As with squid. I remember 30 years ago when squid was bait. The only people who knew [how to prepare it] were some of the Italian fishermen’s wives. But that’s changed. Having it called calamari--nobody knew what that meant--that helped, I think.

The market for local fresh fish is starting to happen, isn’t it?

Yes, we can move in that direction. But it requires continued pushing, getting people to think in that direction, with anchovies, squid, and herring certainly. The herring fishery in the Bay has been hurt by decline in the price for roe [kozonoko]. We should be looking at better utilizing the male herring, maybe looking at old recipes, finding new ways to prepare them. It’s transitioning so these fish are not just ground up for other fish to eat, but instead go directly to market [for human consumption].

It also means we don’t have to harvest so much. Remember, these fish are not just eaten by people, they’re food for marine mammals, seabirds, and other fish. . . .

Isn’t this a good time for these changes, with global warming, and . . . ?

It is, we just have to be cautious of some of the glib solutions--like putting all of our fisheries under IFQs or, with the ocean, protecting only certain areas. To conserve our oceans you’ve got to protect it all, not just portions of it. A good part of this will depend on people getting more educated.

We’re saying: rather than doing aquaculture in the ocean, let’s look at places where we can do this ashore. The argument in the past was where do you find the land for that? Well, in the western San Joaquin Valley there are places we know where if we put water on the land, we get a toxic mess. So why not put containerized aquaculture for tilapia or barramundi or some similar fish there? The water [in the fish ponds] recirculates. You have to add some water but not that much. Also [in the San Joaquin Valley] you’re midway between two large fish-consuming markets--the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin--so transportation is not an issue.

Why aren’t people doing that now?

That’s like saying why are people not doing solar. You need leadership, you need to offer up some carrots as incentives to get people to think that way and do it.

We’re also thinking about the Klamath Basin, looking at some fish production there on retired irrigated lands.

Right now there’s a big push by the federal government for open ocean aquaculture. We think it’s partly driven by the fact that there are so many offshore oil rigs whose useful life is nearing an end, and the oil industry is either going to have to remove them or do something with them. Of course if you can convert them to something like offshore platforms for aquaculture, it allows the existing operators to get out from under removal and cleanup costs.

One more question on salmon aquaculture: Is there a way to grow salmon in pens without contact with the ocean?

Yes. In fact, they are doing some experimenting right now in British Columbia where they called for completely containerizing them.

So then all you have to do is turn the salmon into vegetarians, right?

Not exactly. People say: Well, we’ll feed them soy. And I’m a bit nervous about that, that’s like saying we’ll take all this corn and make fuel from it. That’s terribly inefficient. In the case of soy, why would you be taking perfectly good protein and feeding it to another animal that has to convert it?

And then, soy and corn are two of the principle crops being genetically engineered. Mainly Monsanto’s pushing it. They’re not being genetically engineered to be more drought-resistant or more nutritious, they’re being engineered so they’re more Roundup-ready. So we’re putting more pesticides into the environment with GE crops.

To me that means--step back and think about this--there need to be new ways of developing feeds. One thing we’ve thought about is fish offal, fish scraps. That’s a good use, it’s not commonly seen as a protein that feeds humans. Secondly, maybe it’s time to look at invasive species. Much of our focus on invasive species has been on prevention, which I think is the correct one. The problem is: What happens when you have invasive species established, how do you control them, and what’s the cost of controlling them? So oftentimes we want to poison them. That creates other problems in the environment. Hand-removal costs a lot. However, if we can find something to do with some of these critters, like the quagga mussels and zebra mussels which have now arrived, maybe we can find a way to grind them up and use them for fish feed. In this particular instance you will probably want to develop industries that are [set up to be] nonsustainable. You might wipe those invasive species out!

Has anybody experimented with that?

No, they haven’t. We’d like to push people in that direction. If you’re an entrepreneur, you look at what’s available right now. When you have sources of fishmeal coming from Peru or wherever, then you’re perfectly content and don’t look in any new directions.

And not a single scientist has jumped at this idea?

No, they want to just keep studying it. We tried to propose something like this [a fishery to control invasives] for the mitten crab and they said, “Oh my God, you can’t do that, you can’t have people profiting from them!”

They said: It could cause it to spread. We said: Bond the individuals doing this. They said: We don’t want to get these things in the market. We said: Limit the markets. Let them all go to Asia, where they came from and where there’s ample demand. We air ship fish all around the world. That’s just one example. I don’t think enough people are willing to consider new and innovative solutions to the problems confronting us. We’re trying push them into new ways of thinking.

What about the problem of sea mammals eating up the salmon? I’ve heard you’ve proposed shipping some of them to Norway to be made into sausage.

[Laughs] We’ve had fun offering some tongue-in-cheek solutions. Unfortunately, people took us too seriously, failing to see the humor. I don’t know what the answer is. But I get a bit nervous when I hear people, particularly on the Columbia River, or on the Klamath, saying we don’t get any salmon back because of the sea lions, and my thinking is--maybe if we operate dams differently, or even remove some dams, like on the Snake River, the fish will rebound. At times I think marine mammals do become a convenient scapegoat for bigger problems. On the Columbia, when I hear the Bonneville Power Authority or National Marine Fisheries promoting these takes of marine mammals, I get a little nervous.

Marine mammals were a part of the overall ecosystem before the white man arrived. We never saw rookeries onshore because of predation by mountain lions and bears, and also native hunters. But at the same time I suspect there were probably large populations out on the islands or somewhere they were protected. So we’ve changed their behavior.

The question becomes: are there humane ways of dealing with these populations and doing it in such a way that we don’t lose sight of where the bigger problems are?

Do you see some hope now on the Klamath, in light of the proposed Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement announced January 15? [See www.nccsp.org/files/water-documents for the press release summary.]

This agreement--depending on what PacifiCorp does with it--could help get us to removing the dams. . . . I think there’s some good in the agreement and some things that have to be hashed out. . . . It will take a lot of work.
I told somebody about a year or so ago--they were asking, “When are you going to retire, you’ve been doing this so long?”--and I said, 30 more years. And now this Klamath agreement comes on: 50 years! That’s going to be pushing it. One of my mentors, the old guy in the picture on the wall, who’s cutting fish, retired at 88 or 89, and I might be able to do that, but beyond that it would be really pushing it; even that is going to take a lot of luck.

You obviously are totally committed to what you’re doing.

[Laughs] Mostly, I think, determined. They’re not going to get the better of us.

Did you ever consider doing anything else?

I was in college. I enjoyed it but had no direction of where I was going to go, other than that I had to stay in to get out of the draft, and even that I could only extend for so long. I thought about teaching, and about law. I’d gone to law school, but nothing really excited me. And I got involved in this. You know, I’d been around fishermen all my life, I watched my father and some of the fish politics and had always taken an interest in it, and I enjoyed the fishermen. I still think that as cantankerous as they are they’re probably the best people there are to work for. I felt this was something I could contribute to and something I would probably be better at than anything else where I just wouldn’t have the interest.

Someone told me you considered going into the priesthood.

Oh God, no. I think I jokingly said doing this job is like being in the priesthood--you take vows of poverty and celibacy and everything else. You don’t see your spouse, and when you do they’re angry with you because you’re never home. But my wife has been a good sport. The job takes quite a bit of commitment. But with the commitment comes the enjoyment. I always found that the things I could really get into are the things I really enjoyed. So I can’t complain. It’s been a lot of hard work, but at the same time I’ve loved every bit of it. It’s been very frustrating at times. You see the things that need to be done, and you don’t always have the time or resources to do them. But you just keep fighting.